Tree Of Smoke by Denis Johnson

My invisible foot hurts.

Back in 2011 I smarmily proposed to get around to reading the tattered and slightly mildewing proof copy of the 2007 novel, Tree Of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, which I acquired, as I did with nearly all of my proof copies, through a tendency towards venality, via outwardly benevolent but inwardly self-interested sales reps, with the promise I would mos-def read it straight away and stick up a review on the corporate mouthpiece. This was mostly because Nobody Move was a shit-hot little number, and a very quick read at that.

Well, it’s taken me a further seven years to read it and almost another one to review it, and almost certainly because it is a big book; big not only because it could do serious damage as a projectile, somewhat incongruously so when considered against his previous output, but also because, as Jim Lewis said in the NY Times, it is a Major Novel, with Big Themes (another bloody Vietnam novel?*) and all that stuff.

Ah, prejudice, my old friend. Where would I be without you and your ossified patterns of thinking?

In a premature conclusion, it’s bloody good! All that other crap aside, 600 pages is barely long enough. There’s the Kurtz-type character, Uncle Colonel, whose maverick course meanders through the entirety of the novel. His nephew Skip, a CIA analyst and enthusiastic if ungifted field agent, protects his uncle’s pet project, the titular tree of smoke, whilst being dragged about the South Pacific on paranoid and fruitless errands. There’s an aid worker, her husband lost and presumed murdered, with whom he has a dalliance and who outlives both him and Uncle Colonel. And there are, amongst the other motley cast, a pair of childhood friends whose lives lead them to opposite sides of the north-south divide but whose paths converge under the leaking awning of the Agency. Not to mention Arizona-born brothers Bill and James Houston, at least one of whom makes an appearance in another Johnson novel, although I’ve not read it and can’t remember which one. Their own precarious routes through the military mire are traced right back to Arizona and your sort-of-typical Joe Haldeman Peace and War return to a confusing life where killing people is a choice, not a requirement.

It could be disconcertingly confusing – and often is – but the sprawl doesn’t detract from Johnson’s major attribute, which is assuredly his quite remarkable ability with the English language. Sentences are snappy and dirge-y in the same paragraph, with vivid metaphor – “He strolled the waterfront with the beer thudding inside his head,” – and it’s hard to dwell on any one thing you read because the next thing is on top of you already; you gotta keep on movin’, as one of the Houston brothers learns in the jungle.

DO NOT be put off by the brick-sized tome, nor by its hackneyed setting, as neither is a serious impediment to the action and the enjoyment, if that is the right word to describe the experience, of reading this. It is gruesome in parts, with all the usual bros and hos banter and unsettling hyper-violence you’d expect of anything which touches on the so-called police action, but it’s underpinning motif is loss and regret, I think. But don’t take it on holiday – you’d think it would take up a serious chunk of your sun-soaked reading time, but instead you’ll find you whizz through it and have no room in your luggage for something else to read (unless you also took Nobody Move, but then that wouldn’t take long either).

*I was going to say something about Norman Mailer and his tedious Vietnam novel, but then it appears the only Mailer I’d read was The Naked and the Dead which I had thought was just such a novel. Of course, it was published in 1948 so I must not have been paying much attention… which speaks to its tediousness. In short, Norman Mailer = bad, IMHO.

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